On a frosty February morning, a Franklin Pierce School District bus is filled with kids bound for Elmhurst Elementary School. As the miles bounce by, the child chatter increases in volume. But two girls are unusually quiet.
Ferkhunda and Sofia Aslami whisper to each other. Their wide brown eyes soak in the scene. The sisters don’t speak to the other students.
Just three weeks earlier, the girls – Afghans whose family had fled their country for the relative safety of Pakistan – arrived at Sea-Tac Airport. That’s where their aunt and uncle, Nahid and Yunus Peshtaz of Puyallup, greeted them and welcomed them to their new country.
They are among 33 relatives of the Peshtaz family who have arrived here since August 2006.
This day is the girls’ first day of school in America.
WELCOME TO SCHOOL
The Aslami girls’ parents, father Fawad and mother Ferzana, meet their daughters at the Elmhurst office. There, the school office manager breaks out two backpacks filled with pencils, crayons and rulers. The supplies are donated to the school for kids whose families can’t afford them. Sofia brightens when she’s handed a pink backpack.
Principal Shaun Carey, wearing a tie that depicts children holding flags from many nations, whisks the girls and their parents off on a whirlwind school tour. They visit the lunchroom, the library, the gym.
On this day, the school is celebrating Dr. Seuss day, and classrooms teem with kids wearing tall red-and-white “Cat in the Hat” headgear. Sofia and Ferkhunda take the scene in stride, perhaps wondering if crazy hats are required uniforms in American schools.
LESSON ONE
Finally, it’s time for the girls to meet their new teachers.
As second-grade teacher Karly Olson steps into the doorway to greet Sofia, the girl hugs her father and bursts into silent tears.
Carey tells her parents: “It’s typical for them to be nervous and upset. She’ll be fine.”
He guides Ferkhunda to her third-grade classroom. She smiles, perhaps in recognition of two girls, Reilley Earles and Kristyann Miller. Both were on the morning bus.
Inside the room, the class is working on math. Ferkhunda studies her math book, then looks at other students, their pencils moving as they work on multiplication problems.
She gamely puts pencil to paper. There’s a lot of erasing as she tries to tackle the math.
The teacher moves from desk to desk assisting students. Ferkhunda waits, her leg bouncing nervously up and down under her desk.
Finally, the teacher reaches her and asks: “Do you speak a little English?”
Ferkhunda understands the question, but doesn’t reply out loud. She shakes her head “No.”
“You’ll learn quickly,” the teacher assures her.
The lessons begin immediately. At recess.
A classmate in a cowgirl hat shows Sofia how to line up and proceed outside. At one point, it’s OK to start running for the playground, the cowgirl tells Sofia, who doesn’t understand at first.
Sofia sees the other kids running by, then turns to her new friend and says, in English, “Let’s go!”
The two girls sprint to the playground climbing equipment.
Ferkhunda, meanwhile, experiences her first recess with Reilley Earles, who has taken the new girl under her wing. They spend the last minutes of recess on the swings together.
When recess is over, Reilley tells her: “We have to go.”
But Ferkhunda doesn’t understand. She keeps swinging.
Several girls look at each other, wondering what to do. Finally, they turn and start leaving the playground. Ferkhunda runs after them.
SURVIVAL ENGLISH
Teachers say some of the most basic lessons for students learning to speak English happen on the playground rather than in the classroom.
“I find that students can communicate on the playground and in social situations sooner than they will be able to raise their hand in class or produce written work in the classroom,” says Laura Antanaitis, the English Language Learners (ELL) teacher who works with Sofia and Ferkhunda. “They’ll learn survival language – ‘I want that ball!’ – first.”
At Elmhurst, the girls receive ELL support in their home classrooms, as well as 30 minutes a day in a special ELL class.
Antanaitis notes that English is a third language for these sisters. They grew up speaking Farsi, the language of Iran that’s also widely spoken in Afghanistan, and they learned a dialect in Pakistan. Now they’re tackling English.
Farsi uses a different alphabet, related to Arabic, which is read from right to left instead of left to right. So the English learning curve is steeper than for a child who comes to school speaking and reading a European language.
Antanaitis says studies have shown that children can learn more than one language at a time.
“I just worry that they don’t lose their native language,” she says. “I want them to stay fluent.
ELL CLASS
After a few months at Elmhurst, Sofia and Ferkhunda’s English skills blossom. But they’re still a little shy about demonstrating those skills for strangers.
On a June day, toward the end of the school year, the girls visit Maria D.S. Benavente, an assistant teacher, in Elmhurst’s small ELL classroom. Sofia points to song lyrics written on a poster and reads them out loud, a syllable at a time: “I’m-bring-ing-home-a-ba-by-bum-ble-bee.” Learning the children’s song helps her learn to read the words.
Ferkhunda masters the sounds of most letters of the alphabet. But when she opens a picture dictionary to the “V” page, she struggles with the word and picture for the entry labeled “vehicle.”
Ferkhunda looks at Benavente and asks, “Car?”
Benavente provides an explanation for her.
Both girls love using a felt board to learn more words. As they grab felt picture symbols, their teacher encourages them to tell a story using the pictures.
“If they don’t get it right, I ask them to say it in Farsi,” Benavente says. “That gives them confidence that they do know what this picture is, they just have to learn it in English.”
Benavente has tried to learn a few words in Farsi. Her pronunciation can make the girls laugh.
“When I get it right, Sofia says, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’, so she is teaching me,” Benavente says.
LITTLE HELPERS
Of the 27 students in Karly Olson’s second-grade class, three are new English speakers, including Sofia. Olson says she’s lucky to have a student teacher for part of the year, who devotes one-on-one time to Sofia and the other English learners.
In addition, says Olson: “She learns from the other kids almost by osmosis – she sucks it in in the classroom.”
Renee Peterson, Ferkhunda’s third-grade teacher, describes her as shy and quiet, but also determined to keep up with her English-speaking classmates.
Peterson says Ferkhunda is benefiting from “a really nice group of girls” who want to help their new classmate learn. In some ways, she says, it’s almost as if the girls are “mothering” Ferkhunda – coaching her on class assignments, helping her write unfamiliar words, inviting her to join in their hand-clapping, word-rhyming playground games.
HIGH HOPES
Elmhurst Elementary School represents a step forward in his daughters’ education, Sofia and Ferkhunda’s father, Fawad Aslami, says through a translator.
He observes a huge difference between Elmhurst and the school they attended while living in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Try class size, for starters. Here, the girls share classroom space with 24 to 26 other students. In Pakistan, there might be 45 or 50 children in one class, he says.
In their old classroom, there were no desks. Children sat on the dirt floor. When it rained, they had to put a cloth atop their heads to keep from getting soaked.
“Here, everything is organized, with all the resources you could ask,” their father says. “There, there was nothing to help them on a daily basis. No individual attention to help them grow.”
Ferkhunda, 10, and Sofia, 8, loved their teachers at Elmhurst. But after the sisters’ first school year, they moved to a new school district. They now attend school in Puyallup.
Their parents have high hopes for them as they begin a new school year in a new American school. Ferzana wants one of her children to become a doctor.
Says Fawad: “My hope and dream is that they get enough education not only to please their parents, but their new country. They are American kids.”
Relief fund
A fund at Valley Bank in Puyallup has been established to assist the Peshtaz family’s new arrivals. It’s called the Refugee Relief Fund-Nahid Peshtaz. Donations can be mailed to Puyallup Valley Bank, Downtown Office, 209 S. Meridian Ave., Puyallup, WA 98371. The bank’s phone number is 253-848-7248.
